Chilly Gonzales: a man mourning the death of the chord progression.
Photograph: Alexandre Isard/Air MTM

This year had very few across-the-board musical blockbusters. Most people I know quietly curated their own playlists. But if one listens to the few massive hits of the year, one can hear the final nail being driven into the coffin of the traditional chord progression. If 2013 was a hopeful place for fans of harmony – we were “happy” and “got lucky”, as the real instruments of disco and 50’s soul made a (brief) comeback – then 2014 “shook it off”, and it seemed all that we “fancied” was the rattle of drums and the whine of a playground taunt.

When I began my studies, music was taught to me as the interplay between rhythm, melody and harmony. Harmony was the secret weapon of composers to turbo-charge melodies with emotional context and well-placed, surprising chord tickles the ear and we begin to crave it with each repeated listen.

Remember the goosebumps you got when listening to Something by the Beatles? When the guitar answers George’s “You know I believe her now” with some harmonic sleight-of-hand? Or think of the Pet Shop Boys Suburbia and how the last “a” syllable of the chorus gives way to a darker verse. That’s the sophisticated substitution of minor for major. These emotional bait-and-switches sound positively quaint and old-fashioned today.

The twists and turns of clever harmony have been replaced by sound. A composer like Haydn saw musical colors, or “timbres”, as interchangeable. Composers in the Romantic Era slowly expanded the concept of orchestration, so that a melody written for, say, French horn took special advantage of the instrument and its associations in the listener’s ear.

Today, distinct synthesizer sounds have become their own musical gestures. So the three descending notes of Iggy Azalea’s Fancy don’t amount to much on a piano or a bass guitar – but the notes are irrelevant when compared to the instantly recognizable acid analog squelch that defines this song. Most people could recognize Fancy from a single iteration of one note. The sound is the hook, the medium the message.

When Charli XCX sings the chorus, the phrase “you already know” literally borrows its shape from boastful “nyah-nyah-nyah” chanting you will remember from your scarred childhood. She is, after all, in the fast lane and is lording it over us.

The other song of the year, Taylor Swift’s Shake it Off, borrows its snappy feel-good drumbeat from Happy and/or Hey Ya, but dispenses with the harmonic formalities. The chorus is slightly more sophisticated than Iggy’s, a descending country-infused phrase repeated thrice before she implores us to “shake it off”. Her voice, like Charli’s, is a model of energetic defiance, and it is really, really, loud in the mix.

The almost comical baritone sax bassline is an afterthought here. One could just as easily sing this chorus a cappella while clapping and stomping and not miss any harmonic details, because there are no details, no “chords” as we traditionally define them. This is a sound installation based on a sassy yet self-deprecating attitude and crisp percussion. Music based on such broad strokes, minimalism and the “playground technique” sounds great out of a laptop speaker.

I think music is always pushing forward toward the essential – the history of music is largely a process of reduction, and it is a beautiful process to observe. Listeners are increasingly savvy, so the same old gestures become obsolete, and a composer can telegraph a lot of musical intention with very little actually music.

Sound has been replacing traditional harmony ever since Debussy searched for special effects on the piano that no one had heard before. First, it was amplified guitars and synthesizers, then drum machines, samples and now, along with auto-tune, these are the innovations that have forced music to evolve – and in 2014, our pop anthems proved that the secret is in the sound.

Chilly Gonzales’ piano book ‘Re-Introduction Etudes’ is out now, and he’ll be on tour throughout 2015.